By Ann Dominique Morin
WINNING ESSAY

Reams and reams of copy have been written about the Beijing Olympics – and justifiably so. For it is very difficult to reconcile the principles of Olympism with restrictions on freedoms of religion and expression, preventive detentions, and a world record rate of use of the death penalty. Such a backdrop indeed appears to be rather inconducive to placing “sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity” (second fundamental principle of Olympism).

There are those who, in contrast, have taken offence at the lack of cultural relativism characterizing the outpourings of opinion in favour of the respect for basic rights in China for the duration of the Games. Need they be reminded that human rights are universal? All the more so, at a world event designed to celebrate humankind, such rights should not be relegated to second place, coming after political and economic interests.

That being said, several countries other than China do not have a spotless record where fundamental rights are concerned. Such that, in the future, we must learn some lessons from the Beijing Games in order to prevent repeating a celebration of the kind we were just witness to. Mere promises for change on the part of a government that, from the outset, does not respect the rights of its citizens, is no longer enough. The very integrity of the Olympic Games is at stake.

While the International Olympic Committee stands to lose considerably by closing its eyes to the violations of fundamental rights, it can also considerably enhance its credibility if it successfully fills its role of an international organization that serves to promote basic human rights and that also enjoys the power to grant its members the right to host the Games. For this reason, the IOC is uniquely positioned to act as a catalyst for fostering among its members a deeper commitment to respecting the basic rights of their citizens.

by Bethany Deshpande
Honourable mention

I love the Olympics. I love the precision of top-rate athleticism, the colourful costumes, and the determination in the eyes of not only those competing, but of the coaches, families and even the fans. I love the super-human abilities of our countries best – people who come from our communities, who know our brothers or who are our sisters: people who represent who we are in our best moments.

Instead of showing ourselves in our best moments, however, the 2008 Beijing Olympics were over-shadowed by human rights violations in China. At the time that China won the bid to host the 2008 Olympics, Chinese official Liu Qui stated that hosting the Olympics would benefit human rights development in China.

The world watched, however, as the Olympics actually produced the opposite effect. In the time leading up to the Olympics, many Chinese migrant workers were evicted from their homes, critics of the Chinese government were arrested and detained, Tibetans were massacred by Chinese officials and media and political expressions have continued to be repressed.

The world has watched as China prioritizes glam and pride over the value of human life. Top Olympic sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Lenovo, McDonald’s and more, have failed to demonstrate any sense of social corporate responsibility. Beyond this, however, our display of indifference towards the actions of the Chinese government goes to show where our own priorities lie.

The Olympics are an international event and a reflection of the world’s priorities. This year, humanity prioritized pride and fame over the basic needs of others. The 2008 Olympics will forever be representative of the divide which exists between the rich and the poor and the inequality of a society that we are not only a part of, but one which we have created ourselves.

By Srinivas Murthy
Honourable mention

While any transnational gathering of media, for whatever purpose, will inevitably devolve into political commentary, the tone of the recent Olympic coverage on China’s human rights record approaches jingoistic proportions. While acknowledging that China has a significant distance to travel before it can be considered to be a human rights state equal with other leading powers, it is disappointing to see the large Western democracies sanctimoniously deplore their record. The current global stature of the Western powers has been built almost entirely on the backs of both domestic and international human rights violations, and China is simply following their well-blazed path. The similarities are both striking and far-reaching. The suppression of information access echoes the early 20th century British state censorship of the media to ensure popular support of colonial policies, especially in India. The jailing of innocents without a fair trial has dozens of examples across the 20th century Western world, from communist witch-hunting to the current Guantanamo Bay debacle. China’s neo-colonial agreement with the DRC is humane compared with Belgium’s exploitation of the same region. The resources China gains from dealing with genocidal Sudanese leaders has its precedent in America’s cold-war era support of any despot willing to stand up against socialist influences and sell its commodities at low prices. Arguments that the modern age makes these indiscretions more visible on the global stage do not negate the existence or importance of past abuses. An empire in transition is a dangerous beast for the entire planet, and has been that way since the beginning of history. There is no way that China’s current behaviour should be condoned; however, without placing it in the context of prior violations performed by the nations of the accusers, we are merely repeating history without learning from it. Leaping onto a higher moral plane without acknowledging the past serves no purpose besides fostering the self-righteousness so rife in modern discourse.

In 1998, two sporting scandals resulted in monumental changes to the way the International Olympic Committee operates. The Tour de France doping scandal that July, which saw the Festina team and others ejected for possession of illegal performance-enhancing drugs, spurred the IOC to establish the World Anti-Doping Agency the following year. Then in December, revelations that IOC officials had taken bribes from the organizers of Salt Lake City’s bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics resulted in the establishment of an ethics commission within the IOC.

Surely human rights abuses by Olympic host countries merit the same kind of unequivocal intolerance that the IOC has shown for doping and taking bribes. Considering the IOC’s rapid and thorough response to these two concerns, one would naturally expect the organization to adopt preventive measures to avoid a similar scandal to the one it now faces over China’s broken promises on human rights.

Adopting standards for human rights would send a strong signal to IOC member countries that participation in and especially hosting the Olympics is not a right but rather a privilege that goes hand in hand with state responsibilities to respect and protect the values of Olympism, including human rights. Such responsibilities apply not only within a country’s borders, but they must also govern its international activities and relations. Olympism is, after all, defined as a “way of life” in the Olympic Charter, one that applies beyond the two weeks of competition every four years, and beyond a country’s borders.

The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver are a golden opportunity for Canada to reaffirm the Olympic Movement’s commitment to human rights. China’s lack of real human rights commitments and actions have cost the Olympic Movement dearly in terms of integrity and respect. An Olympic pledge from Vancouver’s organizing committee to put human rights at the centre of the 2010 Winter Games seems unavoidable and will be an invaluable contribution toward restoring the dignity the Olympic Movement has lost.

Rémy M. Beauregard
President
Rights & Democracy

One event in which the Chinese authorities are almost certain to win gold medals is the Internet surveillance and censorship race. Since the start of the century, they have led the world in policing the Net and actively jailing those who treat it as a platform for free expression. Technology and solidarity, however, can help the Chinese netizens break through the Great Firewall.

The Internet police in China number in the tens of thousands. They regularly scan and add new websites to the national blacklists. Speedy Google (or the like) can assist in finding freshly published websites containing ‘damaging information’. Surveillance of Internet communications also operates with banned keywords. Should you write ‘falun dafa’ in an email message or a tomSkype (the Chinese version of Skype) conversation or should these words appear in the content of a web page, then the connection will be broken by the Firewall.

There are several ways to circumvent Internet censorship and protect yourself from digital surveillance. One idea might be to post information as a graphic online. Print out your article, take a photo with your digital camera and upload the jpeg. This will prevent search engines and Firewall filters from reading your post’s content and it will take considerably longer for the Internet Police to find.

You should use webmail services that operate over SSL. This means those that maintain the ‘https://’ address during login and throughout the entire session. They make surveillance of email messages much more difficult. Blog posts and website contributions should be made via such webmail services. Gmail can operate entirely over SSL if opened in the first instance at ‘https://mail.google.com ‘ Others include https://mail.riseup.net , https://fastmail.fm , https://bluebottle.co.uk and https://vaultletsoft.com for the extra security minded.

The best solutions for bypassing Internet censorship at the moment, are those that rely on ‘Western’ computers acting as a gateway for Chinese Internet users. If you have friends or relatives that live in China, set up the Psiphon (http://psiphon.civisec.org) software to create a proxy server on your own computer for their use. Even if you do not know anyone in China, install the Tor (http://torproject.org) software and register to become a bridge in the Tor anonymity network.
This will benefit those living in Internet restrictive regimes and make the Tor network virtually unblockable.

For more info see http://equalit.ie/secbox

Dmitri Vitaliev is a consultant on information security and strategy for human rights and independent media organisations. He is the author of the ‘Digital Security for Human Rights Defenders’ manual of the NGO in a Box – Security Edition team.

Sonam Dolma was thrilled to come to Lhasa, where she had been accepted as the newest member of a small convent. At age 18, she looked forward to her new life working and studying in Tibet’s capital city. Sonam had grown up in a small farming village southeast of Lhasa where Tibetan cultural traditions remain strong and where exposure to the outside – even to other parts of Tibet – is minimal. She had been in Lhasa only a few months when her world changed forever.

A delegation of Chinese officials came to the convent one afternoon in April and accused the nuns of participating in recent street demonstrations. The Abbess of the convent, an elderly woman nearly 80 years old, was taken away. The officials, all men, installed themselves in the convent to begin the work of “patriotic re-education”.

Re-education targets the young and Sonam was no exception. For hours each day, she was subjected to political indoctrination and forced to denounce her spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, as a liar and traitor to the motherland. She resisted, not understanding what was wanted of her.

Sonam had it easier than monks living in the centuries-old monasteries surrounding Lhasa – the renowned Drepung, Sera and Ganden. Instead of indoctrination, they were under lockdown, denied food and fresh water. Some died of hunger. Still they resisted. So did Sonam.

On July 8, one month before China’s Olympics, Sonam and her friends at the convent were taken away by authorities. They were placed on a train with 1,000 others and taken to an unknown destination. According to some reports they are now imprisoned in the distant cities of Gormo (Golmud in Chinese) or Siling (Xining in Chinese). Official media says they will be held incommunicado until after the Olympics are over. They will never be allowed to return to their religious institutions.

Sonam’s distraught mother has managed to communicate with friends in India. “How can my daughter be a threat to China?” she cries. “The Olympics are supposed to bring happiness, but instead they bring only sorrow.”

This story is based on the testimonies of people living in Tibet.

Chinese culture has made an enormous contribution to human civilization. China’s arts and literature, religion and philosophy embody profound beauty and great meaning, developed through a creative cultural tradition of over 5,000 years. The brilliance of China’s culture is an enduring legacy for all mankind.

The idea that there must be a single universal legal code ensuring that all human beings are entitled to certain inalienable rights simply by virtue of being human is not an idea with a long and ancient tradition. Indeed, the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” that is the foundation of contemporary rights discourse was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly just 60 years ago, on December 10, 1948.

The harsh truth is that there is no civilization that does not have in its history a shameful legacy of brutality, arbitrary justice, mistreatment of certain groups, and persecution of those with different spiritual beliefs or political opinions.

However, similarly, there is no civilization that does not traditionally place great value on the dignity of the individual. In Chinese Confucianism, Ren, the virtue of benevolence, is based in recognition of the value of others. Confucius held strongly that everyone he met, regardless of rank or walk of life, should equally enjoy his respect and consideration through Ren.

Those who claim that Chinese culture traditionally values collective rights over individual rights believe that the Chinese Government should not be judged by human rights standards they consider a “Western” concept. But human rights are universal, and are in fact enshrined in the Chinese constitution. The current Chinese Government’s violation of the collective rights of workers to organize free trade unions, and suppression of the collective political and cultural rights of ethnic minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs, make this argument ring hollow. What they really seem to be proposing instead is that the powerful concept of human rights not be used to make the Chinese State and its leaders accountable for unacceptable arbitrary action against certain of its citizens.

In the final analysis, human rights protect and preserve human dignity. They are therefore as much Confucian as they are Christian or Islamic. Human rights are the modern expression of all the great cultural traditions that celebrate human values, including China’s own great cultural tradition.

Charles Burton is a graduate of the History of Ancient Chinese Thought Program of the Philosophy Department at Fudan University and former diplomat at Canada’s Embassy to China who now teaches at Brock University

The Chinese government claims that the country respects its citizens’ freedom of conscience and, when representatives of non governmental organizations criticize violations of religious freedom in China, laments that the international community is so ill-informed.

China ’s constitution does respect the rights of its citizens to profess a religion, but it also supports the right not to believe. The State Administration for Religious Affairs recognizes only five national associations*, and those whose faith is not recognized by any of them must beware! They place themselves in a precarious position, at the mercy of the shifting moods of a civil servant who can decide that their belief is a “feudal superstition” which must be rooted out, or worse, who can persecute them for belonging to an “evil cult”.

Even those who are left alone because they are lucky enough to live in an area governed by more tolerant authorities can never be certain that their freedoms will continue to be respected when there is a change in local government.

The Chinese government claims that the country respects its citizens’ freedom of conscience and, when representatives of non governmental organizations criticize violations of religious freedom in China, laments that the international community is so ill-informed.

China ’s constitution does respect the rights of its citizens to profess a religion, but it also supports the right not to believe. The State Administration for Religious Affairs recognizes only five national associations*, and those whose faith is not recognized by any of them must beware! They place themselves in a precarious position, at the mercy of the shifting moods of a civil servant who can decide that their belief is a “feudal superstition” which must be rooted out, or worse, who can persecute them for belonging to an “evil cult”. Even those who are left alone because they are lucky enough to live in an area governed by more tolerant authorities can never be certain that their freedoms will continue to be respected when there is a change in local government.

Violations of religious freedom in China are not limited to Tibetans who continue to follow their spiritual leader. They also affect Catholics who persist in seeing the Pope as the paramount leader of their faith and Protestants who prefer to hold services in their homes rather than in registered churches under Party surveillance. Even more affected are a larger number of citizens who continue to follow rites that the state distrusts. The idea that the Communist Party, an atheist organization, considers itself qualified to determine what constitutes a “proper religion”, is quite strange. Stranger still is the notion that the Party can decide who should be the next Dalai Lama!

The Chinese Communist Party strives to build a “harmonious society”, and the world could only applaud if it achieves that goal. The Chinese people, believers and non-believers alike, support this goal. Yet the Party does not accept them within its ranks, a decision it justifies on the basis of its atheistic ideology. But this is the same Party that has decided to welcome business people, despite its commitment to socialism. In doing so, Chinese leaders deprive themselves of the enthusiastic support of a great number of citizens of good will.

* Government-sanctioned religious associations linked to the five main religions: Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Catholicism and Protestantism.

André Laliberté is a professor at the University of Ottawa’s École d’études politiques, and his research focusses on relations between the Communist Party and the Buddhist Association of China.

Weiquan yundong is a civil movement of Chinese citizens who apply the current laws in China to stand up for their rights and defend their interests. Some consider the movement to have begun in the wake of the incident involving Sun Zhigang in 2003. A young engineer, Sun Zhigang was beaten to death by guards at a detention centre in Guangzhou because he did not have his temporary resident permit with him.

Via the Internet, the case sparked a protest movement across the country. People from all walks of life, including ordinary citizens, labourers, peasants, intellectuals, public servants and shopkeepers, in all spheres of society—trade, housing, environment, education, media and politics—are now starting to stand up and denounce abuses by those in power.

In some ways, the movement is an extension of the democratic movement of earlier years, but at the same time it may constitute a more solid base for democracy and a constitutional state in China. It has also had a profound cultural impact: the notion of human rights is taking root among Chinese. Yifa zhiguo (ruling the country according to law), a policy pursued by the authorities in recent years, has helped promote the birth of the movement. Nevertheless, Chinese leaders, who are living in a transition period and need to re-affirm their legitimacy, continue to suppress citizens who demand that their rights be respected. The future of China hinges on the development of this movement and the conflict between the authorities and civil rights.

Zhang Lun, a sociologist and human rights activist, has authored a number of books and articles about contemporary China, including La vie intellectuelle en Chine depuis la mort de Mao [Intellectual life in China since the death of Mao] and La Chine en transition [China in transition] (with Aurore Merle).

Over two centuries of rapid industrialization have left an indelible mark on the human landscape in China. While the increasing number of factories and enormous computer dumps reflect the economic successes of the country, these industrial signs also bear witness to the environmental cost of modernization.

This phenomenon not only causes a deterioration of China’s natural resources; it also jeopardizes the health of people who live in affected areas. Although the Chinese government shows signs of willingness to act, financial constraints often impede regulatory efforts, or even bring them to a complete halt.

As a result, private citizens are often the ones driving change, but activism comes with its own set of risks. Wu Lihong’s struggle to protect Lake Tai is a prime example. China’s third largest body of water, Lake Tai (Tài Hú) is the heart of farming activity and the principal water source of over two million residents of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. Nevertheless, the quality of the water has been deteriorating since the mid-1990s because of the many factories dotting the lakeshore.

In 2000, disgusted by officials’ laissez-faire attitude toward the worsening of Lake Tai, Wu launched a major media campaign. His crusade took him all the way to Beijing, where he demanded that a plan be drafted to protect the lake. Initially his activism was applauded by the Chinese media, environmentalists and the party membership. In 2005, he was declared an “Environmental Warrior” by the National People’s Congress.

However, his campaign against industries in the region quickly turned against him. In August 2007, he was sentenced to over 10 years in prison. The charges against him are vague, to say the least: blackmailing the owner of one of the factories on the lake.

Wu Lihong is just one example of China’s new committed citizens. Unfortunately, their status is often precarious. Although they are congratulated and praised, more often than not they find themselves alone, advancing their causes unaided.

A student of Chinese history, Valérie Nichols now studies law at the University of Hong Kong.